"At a time when partisans avow the purpose to obliterate the landmarks of our fathers, and fanaticism assails the barriers they erected for the protection of rights coeval with and essential to the existence of the Union--when Federal offices have been sought by inciting constituencies to hostile aggressions, and exercised, not as a trust for the common welfare, but as the means of disturbing domestic tranquillity--when oaths to support the Constitution have been taken with a mental reservation to disregard its spirit, and subvert the purposes for which it was established--surely it becomes all who are faithful to the compact of our Union, and who are resolved to maintain and preserve it, to compare differences on questions of mere expediency, and, forming deep around the institutions we inherited, stand united to uphold, with unfaltering intent, a banner on which is inscribed the Constitutional Union of free, equal, and independent States. "May the vows of 'love and allegiance,' which you propose to renew as a fitting tribute to the memory of the illustrious statesman whose birth you commemorate, find an echo in the heart of every patriot in our land, and tend to the revival of that fraternity which bore our fathers through the Revolution to the consummation of the independence they transmitted to us, and the establishment of the more perfect Union which their wisdom devised to bless their posterity for ever! "Though deprived of the pleasure of mingling my affectionate memories and aspirations with yours, I send you my cordial greeting to the friends of the Constitution, and ask to be enrolled among those whose mission is, by fraternity and good faith to every constitutional obligation, to insure that, from the Aroostook to San Diego, from Key West to Puget's Sound, the grand arch of our political temple shall stand unshaken." In the meantime a variety of events measurably added to the vehemence of the sectional dispute, which never, for a moment, had exhibited any abatement since the opening of the Kansas _imbroglio_. The antagonism between the two sections, becoming more and more pronounced each day, rapidly developed the true character of the struggle, as one for existence on the part of the South, against the revolutionary designs of the North. Mr. Seward, the Ajax of Black Republicanism, the founder and leader of the party organized for the destruction of Southern institutions, in the fall of 1858, at the city of Rochester, for the first time proclaimed his revolutionary doctrine of an "irrepressible conflict" between the civilizations of the two sections. This announcement, from such a source, could only be accepted by the South as a menace to her peace and security. Such was her construction of it.